A powerful global reaccommodation has begun. Corporations are rediscovering themselves in their muscular masculinity. For we are the makers, the takers, and above all else, we are the winners. Customers, employees, the needy, the vulnerable are, by definition, the losers. Each one of them would gladly trade their seat for one of the tufted leather chairs in our CEO’s office. Instead, make sure your pathetic seatbacks are returned to their upright position, your trays are stowed, and you’re buckled in. For this is your pilot speaking, and we’re ready to fly the friendly skies of “PUT YOUR HANDS WHERE I CAN SEE THEM, MOTHERFUCKER!”

Markets are reaccommodations.

There’s the crew and there’s the screwed. Deal with it.

When jack-booted thugs rough up paying passengers and drag them from your plane, it’s time for the CEO to step up and declare that there’s two sides to every story.

There’s no customer need that cannot be met by a bag of off-brand peanuts.

Customers of course have rights. But only once they have lawyers.

Think of it like this: Boarding a airplane is like opening a shrink-wrapped product, an act that involuntarily voids all your rights. Except boarding a plane means also giving up the shreds of human dignity we didn’t already strip from you during the nudie scan, the TSA ritual ball or tit squeeze, the routine totally un-profiled examination of the darker-hued among us, the lack of sufficient seats in the boarding area, the unexplained delays, and the segregation into social strata announced over the PA. Also, I think we may have missed a spot in your rectum.

Costs have gone up while fuel prices and basic services have gone down, yet more and more people are flying. Therefore, passengers must love us more than ever. You can’t argue with math!

Virtually no other industry uses overbooking as a routine best practice because they don’t love their customers are much as we do.

“First they came for my free crappy meal, and I said nothing. Then they came for my carry-ons, and I said nothing. Then they just said ‘Fuck it’ and came for the guy sitting next to me and dragged him off the plane by the ankles. And I said something, and I video-ed it and I posted it.” Sorry, I couldn’t hear you. I’ve got a corporate reputation to maintain.

Every act of corporate brutality can be fixed by combining the power of euphemism with the audacity of neologism, catalyzed by a really expensive blue suit.

It’s great to know that we’re making our employees so proud! Right, gang? Gang?

Four people fainted on my flight from Munich to Boston last night. That’s not normal.

The person immediately across the aisle from me was #4. We were beginning our descent when I heard the sound of a coconut hitting the floor. He had tumbled out of his seat and was passed out cold in the aisle. I yelled, “Help! Help!” and before I could get unbuckled, he had been surrounded by a couple of other passengers, some flight attendants, and then by two passengers who the attendants apparently recognized as doctors. After about a minute, he came to and said he felt fine, but they made him continue to lie down, and held his legs up. They also took his blood pressure (which was apparently slightly high) and put a bag of ice on his wrist. After a few minutes, they returned him to his seat, and he said he felt fine. He chatted with the person next to him, and I checked in on him too; he made no mention of being diabetic or having any other condition that might have cause his fainting.

“He’s the fourth on this flight,” the attendant said to the person next to me.

Not normal.

Earlier I had been in the little prep area waiting for a bathroom when I took the opportunity to mention to an attendant that my TV monitor was barely working, and that they should write it up for someone to look at after we landed. She offered to look at it now, but I said that I was just suggesting that she write it up. My point is that I was being the opposite of demanding.

As we were talking, a call light went on, and another attendant told the one I was talking with that there was a medical emergency. My attendant said, “I can’t talk now. There’s an emergency.” “I said, of course! Go go!” She went to help, but a third attendant started acting as if I were insisting on continuing to talk about my stupid TV problem while a passenger was in medical distress. The more I tried to explain that I wasn’t even asking for anything be done during the flight, the more the third attendant insisted that I was trying to place my needs before those of the passenger who had just keeled. With just one more twist — say a passenger I had earlier offended overhearing the conversation and assuming I was being a self-centered a-hole — we would have had a pretty good episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm. Pretty, pretty good.